all the wild elephants to-night will—but why should I waste wisdom on a river-
turtle?”
“What will they do?” Little Toomai called out.
“Ohe, little one. Art thou there? Well, I will tell thee, for thou hast a cool
head. They will dance, and it behooves thy father, who has swept all the hills of
all the elephants, to double-chain his pickets to-night.”
“What talk is this?” said Big Toomai. “For forty years, father and son, we
have tended elephants, and we have never heard such moonshine about dances.”
“Yes; but a plainsman who lives in a hut knows only the four walls of his hut.
Well, leave thy elephants unshackled tonight and see what comes. As for their
dancing, I have seen the place where—Bapree-bap! How many windings has the
Dihang River? Here is another ford, and we must swim the calves. Stop still, you
behind there.”
And in this way, talking and wrangling and splashing through the rivers, they
made their first march to a sort of receiving camp for the new elephants. But
they lost their tempers long before they got there.
Then the elephants were chained by their hind legs to their big stumps of
pickets, and extra ropes were fitted to the new elephants, and the fodder was
piled before them, and the hill drivers went back to Petersen Sahib through the
afternoon light, telling the plains drivers to be extra careful that night, and
laughing when the plains drivers asked the reason.
Little Toomai attended to Kala Nag’s supper, and as evening fell, wandered
through the camp, unspeakably happy, in search of a tom-tom. When an Indian
child’s heart is full, he does not run about and make a noise in an irregular
fashion. He sits down to a sort of revel all by himself. And Little Toomai had
been spoken to by Petersen Sahib! If he had not found what he wanted, I believe
he would have been ill. But the sweetmeat seller in the camp lent him a little
tom-tom—a drum beaten with the flat of the hand—and he sat down, cross-
legged, before Kala Nag as the stars began to come out, the tom-tom in his lap,
and he thumped and he thumped and he thumped, and the more he thought of the
great honor that had been done to him, the more he thumped, all alone among
the elephant fodder. There was no tune and no words, but the thumping made
him happy.
The new elephants strained at their ropes, and squealed and trumpeted from
time to time, and he could hear his mother in the camp hut putting his small
brother to sleep with an old, old song about the great God Shiv, who once told
all the animals what they should eat. It is a very soothing lullaby, and the first